Sigmund Freud
Though only mentioned occasionally throughout the essay, Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud is an integral character in Mulvey’s essay. It is his theories of symbolic castration, eroticization, and fetishization with which Mulvey formulates her approach, and she does so through the lens of psychoanalysis, a school of thought which Freud developed himself. Instead of referring back to Freud repeatedly, Mulvey expands and stretches his work and relegates the man to a background role. She does this in part to appeal to her scholarly feminist audience, readers who would already be familiar with psychoanalysis as a discipline but who may not yet have seen it applied in a politically active way.
Jacques Lacan
Mulvey also refers frequently to Jacques Lacan, an influential French psychologist who was inspired by Freud and his theories. As she writes, it was Lacan who theorized the importance of a child recognizing themselves in a mirror for the first time, and Mulvey relates this "mirror stage" back to the cinematic experience.
Marilyn Monroe
To demonstrate her theories of symbolic female castration and the objectification of women in film, Mulvey turns briefly towards Marilyn Monroe. More than anyone else of her era, American actress and singer Marilyn Monroe was seen as a sex symbol. She was widely acclaimed for her beauty and sensuality, and Mulvey discusses how this was captured on film. Starring in such films as To Have or Have Not and The River of No Return, Monroe’s body was displayed as though it was detached from her personhood and personality. As a result, her characters became targets for male desire and the male gaze, leaving Monroe “isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualized” (810).
Josef von Sternberg
Mulvey argues that Austrian-American director Josef von Sternberg's directorial and technical style focuses on the physicality of his female characters—both in the gaze of his male characters, and for male film-goers. According to Mulvey, Sternberg does not filter his erotic subjects through the male gaze but instead cultivates an erotic relationship between the woman on screen and the audience themselves.
Alfred Hitchcock
Mulvey’s second directorial exemplar of sexist cinematic practice is British-American director Alfred Hitchcock. She analyzes Vertigo and Rear Window and concludes that unlike Sternberg, Hitchcock creates a screen space where "the male protagonist does see precisely what the audience sees" (813). The gaze therefore becomes bonded between the actor and the spectator. This is tied to what Mulvey sees as a voyeuristic complex and is further wrapped into the imbalance of power between male and female characters in film.
